The Temporary Gentleman (7 page)

He returned to Accra and poked about for work. He joined the protest march with his fellow ex-soldiers. He was arrested as an agitator and tortured. It was Mr Oko, as a liaison officer with the UN, that got him out of prison.

Hearing all this, I understood better his relative silence in the first months knowing him. Why would he say any of this to a strange whiteman, when it was better just to get on with the bit of work and keep his history to himself?

*

Summer brought Mai home. She had written regular and passionate letters to me from the English school. Now she sent me a postcard to meet her at Rosses Point that Sunday. Her great friend Queenie Moran was now working as a district nurse in Sligo, and Mai was able to tell her father she was going down to see her.

I motored out to the Rosses, through a delinquent sequence of sunlight and rain-clouds, and parked on the little headland where the long flight of steps goes down to the strand. The last cars were turning on the sandy clifftop and the walkers heading homeward. The early dark began to take possession of everything. I knew the motor bus didn’t come out as far as this, but would be depositing Mai further back along the road, and I got out of the car and waited for her. I was veritably trembling.

But she didn’t seem to be coming. I hadn’t seen her now for a long time and maybe at Christmas I had had the sense that she wasn’t making much of an effort to see me. Maybe the whole thing was over and maybe it was better so. And what was it anyhow, but a mismatch between two people from different worlds? That was a small part of my response, right enough. But the greater part of me was caught now in a tidal surge somewhere between longing and anguish. The salt wind scoured my face, and although the rain held off, you could smell it, and almost see it, walking across the wide acres of the sea below. I felt abandoned. Then suddenly she was there.

‘Mai,’ I said.

‘Jack,’ she said. ‘It’s bloody cold out here. What were we thinking of?’

‘I’ve missed you, Mai, so much,’ I said, wondering would I hazard a kiss, or a touch of my hand on her cheek? But she stood there, as if stalled, out of reach somehow, in her fur-collared coat, her hair neatened back and hidden by her hat. She always knew the thing that would suit her. Then she leaned in after all and kissed me, and stood back again. The joy of it, I had to shake my head to get rid of the dizziness she had created. She stood there now, smiling, at her ease. I took the opportunity just to look at her. The face, the eyes I had longed to see again. What is it that starts to bind one soul to another? It is so often like holding an opinion that all the world seeks to refute. But she seemed to me proud, beautiful, and honest. As I stood there in my polished shoes, and my own youth, and regarded her, I knew that I loved her.

We were halfway across the great strand, walking arm in arm, when the deluge struck. She loosened her grip on my arm, and we went careering across the sand, hand in hand, the rain itself as if getting over-excited, leaping at us, and then Mai against my expectation bursting out into laughter, wonderful laughter fulfilling all the adjectives of laughter, pealing, wild laughter, and I knew that it was a genuine delight to her, to be running like that, our leather shoes being ruined by the seawater and the rain, just a kingdom of wetness, till we reached the place she must have been heading for, a cave in the far cliff, which we now threw ourselves into, not a big cave at all, low but enough for me to stand in, with a long sucked-out section where the sea had forced its way in and out, in and out for a million years, beginning long before such creatures as ourselves were on the earth. There, suddenly, she took a hold of me, she just fetched me to her, as if the movement were a peremptory word of some kind, and God knows if we were dressed or naked, I couldn’t say, only lunatics would take off their clothes in an Irish summer, the memory itself is the colour of the new darkness and the old rain, we are blanked out there, but she is kissing me, I can lay claim to be the dependable recorder of that, the very historian, and I am kissing her, and the back of my drenched head is lifting, and I am as happy as man ever was, in the whole history of the world, to be present there, to have reached that moment, of being with her, to be the object of her hunger.

Her father was old for a father and in the way of things he died.

There was a big cortège leaving Grattan House, himself in the horse-drawn hearse. They only had to bring him a few yards to the church. Every now and then, as the priest spoke about him, Mai let out a sort of primeval cry. I put my arm around her in the pew and felt the furnace of grief in her.

Her mother was quiet, as if grief had sewn her mouth with a cruel stitch. I was sitting between Mai and her brother Jack, because there was no one to stop me now, and I felt an odd sense of disgrace in being there, though no one among the living said anything untoward.

While her father lived, the only times I was in the house of late were when he was out, and her mother would let me in, either not being of the same mind as her husband on the subject of the
buveur
of Sligo, or not wanting to go against her daughter.

But in the deep winter following, her good mother withered in the empty house, and also died, and the mason chiselled out under her husband’s inscription the accustomed words,
And of his wife, Mary
.

After this second funeral, in the parlour, and after the mourners had gone home, and only her brother Jack remained, sitting in a chair at the top of the landing with his long legs stretched on the window-sill, out of earshot, gazing at the grey expanse of the sea, dark and mildewed, like one of those great mirrors whose silver backing is failing, not much inclined, as was usual for him, to speak, I sat alone with Mai. She was weakened and vulnerable. She looked like a wealthy person from whom everything, lands, houses, money, has been snatched away in a financial cataclysm, sitting there humbly and quietly, her white hands holding her black gloves, her face down, looking at those hands and gloves, as if they might hold the clue to the next thing she should do. I felt oddly like a doctor, and knew instinctively that she was going to trust in my diagnosis. Just for a moment I thought I should show her the mercy of silence, and say nothing. That could have been the loving thing to do. This was a simplified Mai. She was without question the child of those two vanished people, the absolute child, and I do not know if she had the wherewithal in the upshot to be anything else.

‘He really was a fine old gentleman,’ I said. She raised her face to me when I said it, as if weighing secret things up in a hidden scales. There was a long pause.

‘You are gentleman enough, in your own way,’ she said, not quite trying to flatter me, and maybe even believing it in that moment. Then she let her gaze fall again, as if the conversation was over.

‘We can be married in the spring,’ I said, ‘if you wanted.’

She raised her eyes from gazing at her lap and gazed at me as if I were for a strange moment just as inanimate as the gloves.

‘I do love you so,’ I said.

Her brow creased in a frown and her mouth tightened as though someone had pulled on a little hidden string somewhere in her cheeks. She didn’t speak for a full minute. It was one of those times when I was entirely relaxed with her. She was there before me, our knees nearly touching, the black mourning cloth of my trousers nearly joining with the dark, rich brocade of her dress, as if our clothing was marrying first. How can I talk about her now without praising her? Something keeps clearing, clarifying, so that I keep arriving at her without judgement as it were, as now, when I think about her there, and see her in my mind’s eye, long ago, when she was young, and her parents had deserted her. And what I see is an essence which is in itself solo and isolated, but still a woman replete, laden with gifts, musical, athletic, clever as a general, and seems to sit before me, even now, when she is gone, gone for ever, as real as though I could reach forward and touch her, so powerful, so completely present, and so lovely.

‘But it’s spring now,’ she said, as if this had been the sum of her difficulty in speaking.

‘It’s early spring,’ I said. ‘We could be married in April.’

I had no idea what she was thinking then. She certainly didn’t say. Had she intended to go back to England and resume her teaching? Or join her brother in his practice in Roscommon?

I suddenly felt this was a hand I could not win. I could see the horses massing at the starting gates, they were under starter’s orders, they were off, and my poor nag was surely that broken-backed creature toiling at the rear, falling away at every stride, the loser not only of the race but of every furlong of it. A pit of misery opened its trap door under me. I knew it, I knew it, I was going to lose her. My confidence ludicrously misplaced. Her vulnerability laughably misdiagnosed.

‘Alright,’ she said.

Like a jolt of electricity.

‘I’m sorry if I seem sad,’ she said, looking at me, smiling, ‘I can’t seem to help it. You’re so kind to me, Jack. And I do love you.’

‘April then,’ I said, laughing.

‘April,’ she said.

‘Marry for love,’ Pappy used to say when we were children, ‘or you’ll live your life on Standalone Point and be buried in Melancholy Lane.’ These were actual places in Sligo, one a sandy spit jutting out onto the sloblands of the Garvoge river, the other somewhere in the eastern end of town.

Chapter Eight

Just as night fell, I had two visitors, an officer and a constable of the transitional police force – so, I suppose, in being between two things, suitable people to appear in the twilight. One was a whiteman, sweating profusely, but a handsome individual all the same, the other one of those very severe-looking, very dark-skinned lads, mostly Nigerians, that dominate the rank and file. Just like in the old days in Ireland, when Eneas would be posted anywhere but his native Sligo, they prefer to have strangers policing strangers, because a local man will have too many ties among his own people.

The ‘new’ police don’t have a particularly good name in Accra, certainly not in Tom Quaye’s reckoning, and indeed he was just leaving as they arrived, and I watched the three of them from the porch window, talking for a few moments on the dry dust of the compound, Tom’s attitude and angle of body speaking eloquently of reluctance and fear.

The black constable at any rate was plain and forthright in his roughness and hostility, and it appeared Tom was now obliged to return to the house in their company, because in he came, quite apologetically, trailing the policemen.

‘These two men are here talking to you, major,’ he said.

‘Well,’ I said.

The white officer strode in just as a visiting friend might, at his ease, master of the moment. He enjoyed the rank of inspector, to judge by his cap insignia.

‘McNulty?’ he said. ‘J. C. McNulty?’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘A few questions, if I may,’ he said. I was thinking his accent was Irish, but North of the border, Belfast maybe.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Will I ask Tom to make some tea for us?’

The inspector didn’t look at his constable but declined for both of them. He waved me into one of my own cane chairs, then seated himself opposite on the chair I usually reserve for my feet. The constable stayed looming where he was, and Tom hovered at the door, hoping for a quick dismissal.

‘So what brings you to see me, inspector?’ I said.

Before the inspector could answer, the constable suddenly spoke very fast and confidently to Tom in what must have been Hausa, not Ewe at any rate. Tom replied with one brief syllable, which might have been yes or no, I couldn’t say.

‘The constable is just establishing that your houseboy was in your company when the fracas occurred,’ said the inspector. He had shaved with perfect meticulousness except for a miniature moustache just under his nostrils where the razor hadn’t been able to reach, due to the overhang of his nose.

‘What fracas?’

‘The fracas which occurred in Osu on Friday night.’

‘I don’t honestly recall any fracas,’ I said.

‘Perhaps you recall that a man, Kofi Genfi, was injured?’

‘No.’ I was genuinely surprised, but at the same time, playing back through my muddled memories of the evening, there did seem to be some mysterious elements floating about, such as me being sat on, or something of the kind. And then there was the equally vague memory of my amorousness.

‘We are questioning everyone who attended, but in particular the group you were in. You caused quite a stir apparently. Are you in the habit of going dancing with your houseboy?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I was especially hoping you would remember the incident. The people here are not as a rule inclined to be open with us but I thought that as a European you might be more obliging.’

‘I’m afraid the truth is I was very drunk.’

Thus far he didn’t seem to mind any of my answers, one way or another. He remained perfectly affable. A very good policeman I thought. I had no way of knowing what he was thinking.

‘Your full name is John Charles McNulty, is it not? You were in the sappers in the war and subsequently were with the UN here and in Togoland?’

‘Yes. Here in Accra, mostly.’

‘But you were in Togo, were you not, during the time of the plebiscite?’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘And what keeps you here in Accra, Mr McNulty?’

What indeed?

‘I am just – pausing, I think, before I go back to Ireland. I am writing a little,’ I said, regretting saying it, but at the same time unexpectedly proud of my strange activity.

‘Oh?’ he said.

I waved towards the table, and the discarded minute-book, as if that said everything that needed to be said.

‘May I take a look?’ he said. And before I could say yea or nay in any language, he scraped back his chair and went over to the table and took up this book. He opened it and for some reason read aloud the first sentence he saw there, random, and mysterious: ‘
When I started to bring her almost weekly to the cinema in Galway I realised the pictures were something of a religion for her –
I don’t understand,’ he said.